A wide range of partial solutions to these problems have been suggested.
Intel's® wireless Personal Server project provides a miniaturized computer lacking conventional I/O hardware such as a display or keyboard, but offers network connectivity. Software is installed on a client computer which enables it to communicate with the personal server, so that a user of the client computer can execute programs installed on the server and access files stored on it, using the client computer merely to provide access.
Intel's® Internet Suspend and Resume project uses virtual machine technology to generate a snapshot of a computer's state at a suspend time, which can then be transmitted to a remote site and loaded into a remote computer, from which the user may then resume his session from the stored data seamlessly.
IBM's® SoulPad project depends on a portable hard drive which can be connected to a modern computer using USB or firewire technology. The hard drive has a bootable operating system which is able to identify and control a wide range of hardware, such as the knoppix Linux® distribution. This operating system is able to run a second operating system on a virtual machine. Thus the drive can be plugged into any suitable computer, which when booted from the hard drive will present the same environment as on any other system. Compared with the personal server approach, the SoulPad approach eliminates wireless device association and power requirements. In contrast to both the personal server and internet suspend and resume approach, the SoulPad requires no particular software stack on the client computer.
Certain Microsoft Windows® domain environments offer a Roaming User Profiles feature. According to this, a user may have a roaming account on the domain, whereby whenever he logs onto a computer connected to the domain, personal setting data is retrieved from the domain server, rather than the local computer. When the user logs off again, the information is uploaded to the server. This approach is naturally dependent on a homogenous network and client architecture, and is furthermore limited to a local network.
Social bookmarking is a mechanism whereby individuals store URL/URI data such as “favorites” or “bookmarks on an internet server rather than on their local machine. By accessing a particular website they can thereafter access this information from any internet computer. This technology is limited to URL data.